Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is still in an acquisitive mood, and he now
could be setting his sights on buying a semiconductor company.

At a meeting with analysts Sept. 23, as Oracle's
OpenWorld show wound down in San Francisco, Ellison reportedly said his
company would be interested in buying a processor company, igniting
speculation around such firms as ARM, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia,
Marvell and Broadcom.

"Our focus is to build our [intellectual property] portfolio," Ellison said during the meeting with analysts, according to Reuters. "You could see us buying chip companies. Silicon is very important, software IP is very important."

With its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems
earlier this year, Oracle joined the race to offer integrated data
center solutions, competing against the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard,
Dell and Cisco Systems. Ellison, who has been vocal in his desire to
take on tech giant IBM, sees the combination of Oracle's database and
enterprise software and Sun hardware as a key differentiator for his
company going forward.

Oracle, the world's third largest software vendor,
gave the industry a look at where it's going during the OpenWorld show,
rolling out its Exalogic offering,
an integrated hardware and software solution designed to let businesses
run a private cloud environment from a single, self-contained system.
The Exalogic hardware held both the Oracle and Sun logos.

It follows on Oracle's Exadata integrated database
system, rolled out last year. A new version of Exadata was introduced
at OpenWorld.

Oracle also gained chip development capabilities
through the Sun deal. Sun created the SPARC processor platform and
also built servers that were powered by AMD and Intel chips.

In talking about buying a semiconductor company,
Ellison reportedly said he wanted to model his approach to that of
Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whose company bought chip makers as it built its
popular iPhone and iPad devices.

Oracle may be looking at a processor vendor that
makes chips for servers, said Doug Freedman, an analyst at Gleacher and
Co., citing AMD, Nvidia and IBM's chip business, according to Bloomberg.

"You've got to think it's focused on enterprise hardware, on the server," Freedman said. "AMD jumps off the screen."

Further fueling speculation over Ellison's hardware
ambitions was the decision earlier this month to hire former HP CEO
Mark Hurd. Hurd's hiring came a month after he resigned under pressure
from HP following a sexual harassment complaint from a former HP
contractor and the discovery that he fudged expense reports to conceal
his personal relationship with her.

Ellison, a close friend of Hurd's, soon after blasted
the HP board of directors for forcing out Hurd, and then hired Hurd as
co-president of Oracle.

During the analyst meeting, Ellison also reportedly
turned his attention to other areas, including software makers whose
products are focused on particular industries, a move that would help
Oracle differentiate from rival SAP.

In addition, he also threw storage maker NetApp's
name into the discussion. Ellison pointed out that about 60 percent of
NetApp's business revolves around data from Oracle databases.

"We love that business," he said, according to The Register.
"We would love to have that 60 percent. Do we need to acquire? I think
there are some interesting technologies we'd like to acquire. ... I
think it is possible."